Missouri Dems’ thin bench

The Missouri state auditor’s post has been a launching pad for politicians with higher aspirations like Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and former GOP Sen. Kit Bond. But this year, Democrats concede they won’t field a serious candidate against incumbent Republican Auditor Tom Schweich — sparking questions about the strength of the party’s bench in the red-trending swing state.

Schweich may also be using his position to mount a bid for higher office in 2016, making Democrats’ historic failure to recruit an opponent for Schweich even more costly.

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“The reality is we believed we had a candidate who withdrew mid-cycle, so people who might have otherwise taken a hard look at it didn’t get that chance. So you were asking people to make decisions relatively quickly,” Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Roy Temple said in an interview. “We weren’t successful in finding a serious challenger.”

State Rep. Jay Swearingen, a North Kansas City Democrat, bowed out of the race in January, saying that he wanted to step aside for a Democrat who was better able to raise money for the contest.

Democrats last held the post in 2010, when Schweich defeated incumbent Susan Montee.

In an interview, Schweich said he was “pleased that for the first time in over a century the Democrats have failed to field a Democrat for a statewide seat in Missouri.” But he said he wasn’t sure if that was due to their lack of credible candidates, or his own fundraising strength.

“I think Missouri is basically a conservative state,” he said. “Governor [Mitt] Romney won by 9 or 10 points and we lost 5 out of 6 statewide elections in 2012 for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the people of Missouri disagreeing with us.”

Temple pushed back against the idea that the Democrats lack talent that could ascend to top offices such as the U.S. Senate or the governor’s mansion, saying that there’s an “extraordinary talent base on the Democratic side.”

“We have very serious stars in Attorney General [Chris] Koster, State Treasurer Clint Zweifel, Secretary of State Jason Kander,” he said. “You have a two-term governor who has plenty of political energy left in his tank. There are skillful and talented politicians distributed widely around the rest of the state.”

While Missouri has trended away from Democrats in recent years — the state was a closely-contested presidential battleground in 2008, but President Obama conceded it in 2012 — the party has won key elections over the past few cycles.

Republicans saw a big opportunity in 2012 to topple McCaskill, one of the Senate’s most endangered incumbents. But she won handily over then-GOP Rep. Todd Akin, whose comments about “legitimate rape” and pregnancy torpedoed his campaign.

Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon easily won reelection in 2012 over GOP challenger Dave Spence, a relative political neophyte who jumped into the race when Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder dropped his bid for governor in November 2011.

Nixon will end his second term in 2016 and cannot seek a third; many Democrats assume he’ll run for U.S. Senate in 2016 when GOP Sen. Roy Blunt is up for reelection.

Schweich is widely expected to run for governor, and the boost he’ll get after winning reelection unopposed could add heft to a future campaign. Former state House Speaker Catherine Hanaway has also announced that she plans to run for the Republican nomination.

Temple called the absence of a Democratic candidate for the auditor’s post“ disappointing” but said it would “certainly make the 2016 GOP primary for governor more interesting to watch.”

“I would think [Schweich] would marshal those resources and assuming he gets into that primary, he’ll be well funded,” he said. “Sparks will fly, and I will watch and be entertained.”

“If I had a chance of recruiting someone who had a credible chance of winning, I would have done so,” he added. “But I wasn’t able to do that. There’s no reason to put up someone for the sake of it, especially if he’s likely to store his money up and use it against a fellow Republican.”

Schweich declined to discuss his future political plans, saying he’s been “very careful not to talk about 2016 right now.”

Koster, the state attorney general, has said he intends to seek the Democratic nomination. But there are few other Democratic prospects to point to.

The only two Democrats in Missouri’s House delegation represent the state’s most populous urban areas – Rep. Lacy Clay of St. Louis and Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver of Kansas City – and neither is seen as likely to ascend to the governor’s mansion or the U.S. Senate.

The state’s other House seats are largely out of Democrats’ grasp because of the most recent round of redistricting, in which Republicans held heavy sway. Republicans control the state legislature, and though Nixon vetoed the Republican-written remap, but his decision was overridden by the General Assembly.

The remapping of districts pitted Clay against fellow Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan in a primary in a district with roughly 50 percent black population; the Democratic electorate is significantly more African-American than that. Clay defeated Carnahan easily in the 2012 primary.

The state’s six GOP-held House districts, Temple, the state Democratic chairman, said, “are very challenging districts by design.” Democrats failed to earn even 40 percent of the vote in any of these seats in 2012, while Clay and Cleaver coasted to easy wins in their districts.

Temple seemed bullish about his side’s chances in 2016, despite the state’s overall trend away from Democrats at the presidential level.

“In constitutional offices, U.S. Senate races, everybody starts with a jump ball. In those, we have any number of high quality candidates that can credibly present themselves for those positions and have a very high chance of winning,” he said. “There will be some shuffling of the decks and I like our stable better than theirs.”